Clad in long sleeves and fluorescent vests – their cause’s de facto emblem – the heat must’ve been unbearable. But that’s precisely why Qatar’s beleaguered workforce had risen in protest. Forced to toil in 45°C sun, sometimes with little water, and often with no guarantee of wages paid, they are the foot soldiers of the FIFA 2022 project. Qatari efforts to prepare for the football World Cup have come at a terrible cost: the exploitation, and even the lives, of thousands of labourers. But now, tentatively, some good news – the Gulf state’s divisive kafala laws, which prohibited staff from leaving without employer consent, have been scrapped.    

In a rare occurrence of industrial action, at least 5,000 disgruntled workers took to the emirate’s streets in early August. Poor living conditions, heinous work practices, and what some described as ‘inhuman’ treatment had driven them to mobilise – but it was the kafala arrangement that arguably cut deepest. 

Arabic for ‘sponsorship’, the system demands migrant workers obtain their companies’ permission before changing jobs – a condition that fosters abuse and exploitation, rights groups say. The regulation – which is common in Gulf states – was lifted on some foreign labourers last year, but only now has it been shelved altogether.        

Boasting of the country’s commitment to workers’ rights, Qatari leaders have heralded the move, framing it as part of their pledge to push through labour reforms prior to 2022. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), an agency of the UN, praised the country for “contributing to a more efficient and productive economy” – but not all are convinced. “The devil will be in the detail,” said Stephen Cockburn of Amnesty International, noting that the changes will have to be scrutinised closely before entering law early next year.

A construction boom has swept Qatar ahead of the tournament, fulfilled almost singularly by migrant workers. From Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan they’ve flocked to the tiny Arab state, swelling the 333,000 population to almost two million. A shot at grandstanding on the global stage is not to be missed, and Qataris want their nation to sparkle for its international audience. 

But for all the positive PR and investment opportunities the games may bring, Qatar is meteorologically ill-suited to host a worldwide sporting event. Already the schedule has been shunted from its typical summertime start date to November – an attempt to avoid the most oppressive heat. Likewise, stadiums have been outfitted with goliath cooling systems, designed to envelop spectators in a sweat-free bubble.

That these measures are necessary, none could dispute. Qatar sits at a critical intersection of geography, urbanisation, and climate change. The last century has seen average temperatures rise a seemingly small but utterly sweltering 2°C. So lethal is the heat that locally based US Air Force personnel are required to drink two bottles of water an hour, and work only in 20-minute intervals.

Qatar’s migrant muscle enjoy no such consideration. As the mercury approached 50°C this summer, construction projects reached their peak. For ten hours a day in some cases, workers slogged under the unforgiving sun. A 30-minute break might be offered to those on eight-or-more hour stretches, worker testimonies indicate – but often that time is cobbled on at their shift’s end. Worst still are the stories of dehydration. “Quench your thirst – safety first,” read the signs at building sites around Doha, but a chronic lack of clean water is widely reported. 

In an effort to protect labourers, authorities introduced working restrictions during the hottest part of the day. But research suggests that, even in hours outside the ban, potentially fatal temperatures are common. Hundreds of workers, mostly in their 20s and 30s, die every year. They suffer a range of ailments: skin allergies, headaches, altered vision, light-headedness, difficulty breathing – all are heat-related.

The majority of fatalities are attributed to cardiovascular issues and officially registered as non-work-related. This is fundamentally inaccurate, health experts say. A recent study by a group of climatologists and cardiologists – published in the Cardiology Journal – explored the link between Qatar’s intense climate and the deaths of 1,300 Nepali workers. Heatstroke was to blame, they concluded.

Still, in what critics say is a deeply cynical move, employers often refuse to pay compensation, which – under Qatari law – is optional with deaths deemed natural. The result is devastating: bereft families left traumatised and penniless. 

For those who escape with their health intact, the guarantee of prompt payment – if at all – is often wafer thin. Sweeping research by Amnesty found hundreds of labourers have been forced to return home empty-handed, unable to shoulder the costs required to take legal action against unscrupulous bosses. One man, Bijoy, waited three months before receiving a hearing date, by which time he had returned to India to care for his ailing father.

“I begged the chairman’s brother to give me even 4,000 riyals [around $1,100 – far less than the $3,750 he was owed]. He gave me 1,000 and my flight. I have to forget the money and go,” he said.  

Since the August protests, Qatari officials claim to be righting these wrongs, arresting employers who refuse to pay workers’ dues. They’ve also pledged to introduce a minimum wage. The precise figure is yet to be set, but a temporary measure affords staff a baseline of 750 riyals (around $200) per month. For the world’s richest per-capita nation, it’s a paltry sum.     

But from winning bid to stadium building, little seems fair about Qatar’s 2022 project. The World Cup will no doubt dazzle as it always does, but the terrible human toll must not be forgotten.

L'articolo A Breakthrough For Qatar World Cup Workers’ Rights – But Still Conditions Are Condemned proviene da InsideOver.

“In other words… Slavery has not been completely abolished” – Dr Angela Davis, “Slavery and the Prison Industrial Complex.”

Davis, who grew up in the segregated southern city of Birmingham, Alabama, home of the 1963 terrorist bombings against the black community in which four little girls died, has dedicated her life to the struggle for social justice and civil rights, specifically within the black community in the USA. Her work on the abolition of the prison industrial complex, which has gained greater prominence following the 2016 Netflix documentary “13^th”, has spanned over five decades and includes more than ten books. In her work, Davis, who was imprisoned following time spent on the FBI’s most-wanted list in 1970 and was realised in 1972 after a global campaign for her freedom, explores the institution of prisons as an enterprise, and the corporations whose profits are rooted at the centre of mass incarceration.

The title of Ana DuVernay’s award-winning Netflix documentary takes its name from the 13^th Amendment. The political doctrine which was ratified in 1865 by congress and amended the American Constitution, ‘banning’ slavery, except, as the documentary highlights, as a punishment for crime.

Following the introduction of the 13^th Amendment, the ‘liberation’ of slaves left huge gaps in the American labour market. Work that had once been carried out by force, for free, was no longer being completed. Meaning former slave owners and heads of industries that once utilised slave labour needed another way to fill the void of labour following the ‘end’ of slavery. The 13^th Amendment provided a legal means through which this chasm could be bridged.

The introduction of the laws of the Jim Crow era in 1870 (which ran until 1965) meant that black people were to be racially segregated and could be arrested, en masse, for offences such as looking at a white woman, shaking hands with a white person or showing public affection to another black person. These laws ensured the continuation of white supremacy following slavery. Enabling prisoners to be declared ‘slaves of the state’; convict leasing allowed convicts to be ‘leased’ to private parties, such as plantation owners, mine owners and other corporations.

Labour as Penitence

Of course, if someone is convicted of a crime, they should be punished. But to what extent should this involve forced labour?

Not all crimes are worthy of the sentences inferred on them, if any, and with growing awareness of police violence towards (specifically) young black men in America, the systemic and disproportionate imprisonment of people of colour, means we can ascertain that the state of America’s criminal justice system doesn’t always protect those most vulnerable to its predatory laws.

American holds 25% of the world’s prisoners but just under 5% of the world’s population. In 1970, the prison population was 357,292. By 2014, the prison population was 2,306,200. Whilst one in 17 white men will serve time in prison, one in three African-American men will spend time behind bars and one out of four prisoners in the world, is imprisoned in the USA. This means more than half of all adult black women in America have at least one family member locked up.

Prisoners are forced to carry out labour to buy necessities, often at premium rates, such as clothing or shoes that fit (most prisoners can expect ‘one-size-for-all clothing and shoes upon arrival), soap (the cheapest soap is a 4-pack of Ivory for $3.50), toothpaste, phone-calls, pain-killers (a small packet of Aspirin is $1.50) or food. This factory-style labour can range from production lines for private companies, such as stitching $90 underwear for Victoria’s Secret, dealing with customer returns for Walmart or packaging coffee for Starbucks, earning as little as 23 cents to $1.15 per hour.

Fighting Fire with Fire

Not only are inmates being recruited to fight fires for a basic wage of around $2 a day plus $1 an hour, (compared to the average wage of a civilian firefighter in California coming in at $73,860 per year) they are also more likely to be injured whilst at work. During an active fire, inmates can be expected to work 24-hour shifts and given that more than 1,500 inmates received injuries so bad they required hospital treatment between June 2013 and August 2018, including being 8 times more likely to suffer smoke inhalation than civilians, the impact of this intensive work can have lasting impacts, long after their sentence has been served.

Beyond the health implications of working as an inmate firefighter, taking part in the programme doesn’t equate to opportunities for employment on the outside. With 65 million US adults holding a criminal record and 90% of employers carrying out criminal background checks, unemployment rates for former inmates soars to 27.3%, compared to 3.8% for the general public. With 4000 inmates working on the front line to tackle California’s wildfires last year, it’s inconceivable to think that after training for the position, these men won’t qualify for the same job once released.

Modern Slavery and America

The forced labour of America’s inmates, a disproportionate number of whom are people of colour (67%) – 94% of which are sentenced without trial – is so akin to the financial and state-protected infrastructure of slavery, that evaluations such as Dr.Davis’ are difficult to deny. Whether forcing humans to make up the production lines for designer outlets, filling up call centres with free labour for private corporations or allowing men to lose their lives fighting fires for less than the price of a bar of soap, the prison industrial complex and its ties to slave-era labour must be as Dr.Davis suggests “radically abolished” to make way for restorative justice and reconciliation that allows for true rehabilitation of offenders. A justice that allows for those most vulnerable in society to move access fair, unbiased and appropriate penance.

L'articolo The Inmate Firefighters Risking Their Lives For $1 An Hour proviene da InsideOver.

Every year, tens of thousands of people from Turkmenistan are forced into picking cotton by the government. According to a report by Anti-Slavery, during the cotton harvest, workers from both the public and private sectors are made to fulfil quotas by picking cotton in what was described as “hazardous and unsanitary conditions”. It revealed that doctors, dentists, teachers, students, and military personnel are some of those obliged to abandon their normal duties to be transported to the cotton fields.

Anti-Slavery International’s partner Alternative Turkmenistan News (ATN) estimated that during the 2016 cotton harvest around 49,000 teachers – in a country with a population of less than 6 million – were working in the cotton fields as part of Turkmenistan’s forced labour program.

Like neighbouring Uzbekistan – one of the world’s largest cotton exporters with a similar state-orchestrated system of forced labour – Turkmenistan’s centrally command economy means that the government controls the production of cotton; the pricing structure for harvested cotton; and the required quotas produced from local regions. Forcing people to work in the cotton fields is the only way to meet the pressures of those quotas. Since there are not enough manual labourers within agriculture to meet demands, the government intervenes by forcing other workers from within the public to travel to the cotton fields under threat of penalty.

Those who have the means, opt to bribe the officials to escape the gruelling work obligation. Others, who are not able to afford to do so, are resigned to the arduous work conditions where they have limited access to drinking water, showers, and toilets.

Unlike Uzbekistan, where efforts to end this state-sponsored system are creating some small steps towards change, this is not necessarily reflected in the same manner in Turkmenistan. This was illustrated by the three-year imprisonment of Gaspar Matalaev – a reporter with Turkmen.news – who was arrested just two days after the publication of his article on the systematic use of forced adult and child labour in Turkmenistan during cotton harvesting. Matalaev was allegedly tortured by electric shock and held incommunicado, before being released this just earlier month after serving his full sentence.

Despite a ban on child labour in 2017 due to poor harvest, one region’s local education department ordered children to be sent to the cotton fields during their scheduled school term break. Witnesses attested seeing truckloads of these young students arriving for duty and being sent off to the fields. Early indications suggest that this year’s harvest is, again, likely to be below par once again which would make quotas difficult to meet.

Joanna Ewart-James, Executive Director of Freedom United, the world’s largest community for ending human trafficking and modern slavery, explained, “The reduction in the use of forced labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry in recent years and the Roadmap of Reforms to end Systematic Forced Labour in Uzbekistan developed by the Cotton Campaign coalition shows that it is possible to implement a better system.”

“However alongside a clear commitment from the government towards an aspiration of an end to reliance on forced labour, structural reforms must be enacted, and civil society must be empowered to ensure transparency. This must all be backed up with accountability across every aspect of the reform process. “

James also believed that most people are unaware that they might be inadvertently supporting this system every time they go shopping for clothes, and that it is often difficult to detect. “Because the labelling system typically displays the final country of manufacture and not the country of origin of the raw product, it is not easy to avoid cotton from Turkmenistan, which is sold to countries with garment industries where the cotton is used in retail products,” she said.

“However, there are facilities in Turkmenistan that produce manufactured goods. Towels bearing ‘Made in Turkmenistan’ labels were for sale on the websites of Amazon, Wal-Mart, and eBay in the US at the end of 2018 despite a ban on the import of cotton from Uzbekistan by the US Customs and Border Protection in May 2018. More recently, T-shirts bearing ‘Made in Turkmenistan’ labels were found being sold in Bulgaria at an Austrian superstore.”

The only current strategy against this dilemma is to ask the retailer questions about the origin of the cotton in the goods and if they have signed up to the Cotton Pledge Against Forced Labour.

In 2018, the US banned the import of cotton from Turkmenistan and 70 companies have now pledged to not knowingly source cotton from Turkmenistan because of the systematic use of forced labour and questionable slavery implications in its production. It is hoped that both these mechanisms will support other efforts to call on the government of Turkmenistan to take action that will bring an end to this system.

L'articolo How You May Be (Unknowingly) Supporting The Cotton Slave Trade proviene da InsideOver.

With vegetarianism and veganism on the rise, the need for cashew nut has grown exponentially over the years. With an annual value of over $4 billion, it commands high prices in Western countries and is widely featured in new and trendy recipes. Yet, it is exported from some of the world’s poorest corners, and unbeknownst to the average consumer, those in the lower tiers of the production line of the nut, toil in some of the harshest conditions and suffer daily horrific burns and pain – just to feed the West’s insatiable hunger for cashews.

Because of the delicate nature of the task, most cashew nuts are hand-shelled. Between the layer of the shell and nut, however, are cardol and anacardic acids, which cause burns and open sores when coming in contact with human skin. A lot of the workers involved in the shelling process are not provided with gloves, and even if they were, most opt to not wear them since it would slow their work down. They are paid by the weight of the nuts that they are able to shell.

One nut sheller, Pushpa Gandhi, 30, told the Metro that she is covered in scars from shelling cashews.

“Today when we go home and wash, we will see the boils on our skin. It takes about a week for them to heal. But as the old ones heal, new ones keep coming,” she said.

Nurse Uma Jayamurthi admitted to the paper that she had seen an increasing number of patients who opted to chop off the top of a finger. Around 40 per cent of the patients she saw at the centre where she worked, were because of cashew-related injuries. She said that since most could not afford the medical costs, they only went when the pain became “unbearable”. The main reason for hospital visits was when the cashew acid got under the nails and it got infected.

ActionAid reported that supermarkets are further entrenching these workers in poverty by trying to reduce producer prices, contributing to an explosion in illegal processing operations, where a predominantly female workforce has few rights and little opportunity to demand a better deal from employers. Their research in India found workers processed cashew nuts for as little as 30p a day, damaging their health through exposure to corrosive oil during shelling and smoke released in the roasting process.

With an annual turnover of over $3 billion, Vietnam remains the world’s number 1 producer and exporter of cashew nuts. Yet according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a big percentage of cashew nut production comes from national drug rehabilitation centres where addicts are forced to do gruelling manual labour as part of the rehabilitation program. Furthermore, beatings, electric shock, starvation, and prolonged isolation were used to punish those who refused to work.

Former detainees told the organisation that they worked between six and eight hours a day shelling nuts and some worked even longer. They also said that resins from the nuts caused their skin to burn or itch and that dust from the cashew skins made them cough.

HRW also discovered that the forced labour in the centres was frequently unpaid. And if wages were paid, they were at rates well below the minimum wage. Former detainees also said that charges on their wages for food, accommodation, and “managerial fees” were often levied. Those fees often constituted a substantial amount—in some case all—of their derisory wages.

The authorities were also accused of deceptively portraying the slave-labour like conditions as something positive, stating that one state-controlled media article said that detainees in one particular centre “are given the chance to learn the skill of cashew nuts processing.”

Despite the controversial nature of the cashew industry, the demand for the nut continues to bolster the trade for exploitation. Fuelled by consumption and profitability margins, it is debatable whether sufficient efforts will be made to improve the plight of the workers.

L'articolo The Cashew Nut Cruelty That No One Tells You About proviene da InsideOver.